Cheating! That’s what I like, and it’s what I’m going to do right now. Three months back when I was still writing about Second Life, I tangented on the subject of text-messaging:
Hell, when I first heard about text-messaging, I scoffed. Scoffed, I tell you! I even remember whennish and whereabouts I was: walking down the Embarcadero in 2000 with my supervisor at CNET, a fellow who was much more on top of cutting-edge technology than myself. He was telling me about something called text-messaging, which was either just introduced in American or was about to be, but was all the rage overseas. I was five stubborn years away from even considering a cell phone, and text-messaging sounded like the most impractical thing ever. Words on a cell phone screen? And typing them via the number pad? Puh-leeze. As if.
The obvious punchline is that I’m now a text-messaging addict. A junkie. A filthy carpal-thumbed 160-character whore, I am. I got my first cell phone in October 2005 for use during a well-intended if poorly-attended book tour. (If you ever want to read to six rows of empty folding chairs near the Canadian border, drive to Bellingham, Washington. Builds character.) Empirically speaking I would still be alive right now, but emotionally I suspect the trip would have killed me if not for text-messaging. Waking up to messages from my girlfriend Vash made waking up seem worth the effort at all, and furiously thumbtyping back and forth with a friend during a particularly rough patch somewhere between Portland and Seattle was an excellent outlet.
Damn, quoting myself like that was all meta ‘n shit, wasn’t it? And certainly not narcissistic. It’s all true, though, and the ensuing quarter of a year has done nothing to diminish my love of the textiness.
A lot of people call it impersonal. I think it’s like any other form of communication: it’s as personal as you care to make it. Some of the coldest, most meaningless conversations I’ve ever had have been face to face, and I’ve been known to get teary standing on a streetcorner clutching my vaguely communicator-esque phone, SMSing away. (Last Saturday night around half past ten at Church and Market in San Francisco, dressed in black, long blonde pigtails, smeary eyeliner? That was me.) Language is too powerful to be entirely stymied just because it’s on a screen 1.25″ wide and 1.5″ tall. If they have a personal context, the word no can be devastating or yes uplifting or vice versa no matter how they’re conveyed.
I also like the discipline it requires of me. Evidently I crave structure and boundaries, because without them, I can be…verbose, downright wordy, perhaps even pointlessly enamored of my own ability to make a simple point using as many words as I can, extending five hundred words of content into the four-digit range. (Did you catch that? I was being meta again!) 160 characters ain’t a whole lot, though, and while if need be I can send more than one message, I like trying to make the point in the characters allotted. Usually I’ll try to write it using my normal style, and if it’s running too long, I’ll eliminate words like “really” and “necessarily,” which are a bad first-draft writing habits of mine in any format. And if I’m still pressed for space, maybe I’ll replace “for” with “4” and so 4th forth. But I don’t like to do that, as much out of snobbery as anything else. The primary exception is plzkthxbye (or its regional variant plzkthxbai). And anything used on I Can Has Cheezburger? is perfectly fine, of course.
I’m not sure if text messaging is internet technology per se, but for the sake of this next point, I’m going to pretend that is: for me, the internet is about augmenting real-world relationships. (Well, that and piracy. Arrrrrr!) Unless it’s directly related to work or my writing/performing stuff, I don’t spend much time talking online to people I don’t know in real life. It’s one of the reasons why I never seriously considered joining Second Life while I was writing about it. Beyond the timesuck factor, I like to know the actual meatspace denizen on the end of the information superhighway.
Sure, I know Second Lifers who interact with other real-life friends in that context, but I’d wager it’s a very small percentage overall. Roleplaying is much fun in real life (ezri loves poppers), but my need for connection is only sated if I know that I’m one real person interacting with another real person, as we really are. Otherwise, it doesn’t feel…well, real. For me, in mostly-real-time communication, graphics and 3-d icons and avatars and whatever the frack a “Zwinky” is detract from the perceived reality, create an artificial distance within a context which is pretty damned removed as it is. I think that’s similar to the point that Neal Stephenson made in In the Beginning Was the Command Line, but I’m not entirely sure. All I know is I read that book at an impressionable time (my mid-twenties), leading to an ill-fated flirtation with Linux. I don’t know, it might have worked if the dual-boot thingy had ever behaved, but even when it did, I kept sliding back down the learning curve of installing packages. It seems unlikely that I’ll ever graduate beyond kindergeek status, and I’m okay with that.
It’s one of those simple technologies which makes living in the Future so keen. I’ll probably always get a kick out of it, and I find the idea that the messages traveled such a narrow path—from brain to thumb to phone to other phone to brain—to be strangely romantic, proivded I ignore that at least half the text-messaging I do is to Vash’s email while she’s at work. Pick pick. I sometimes do commute races via text-messaging with a friend who rides a parallel train line.
And, like most anyone who fancies themselves a writer, I’m a word fetishist. I like words, I like language, and I like seeing them there all by their lonesome
What’s drab and boring to some is pure and uncluttered to others.